What does science have to teach about innovation? It draws on a rich experience, including failures, on the long and winding road to success — and to amazing possibilities.

"It’s not unreasonable to consider that everything that’s yet to come, our brains cannot even conceive of right now," said Deborah Berebichez, a Discovery Channel personality and Stanford-trained physicist. "We as humans have an enormous capability to take information and resources we’re given and then to produce discoveries beyond our imagination."

Berebichez made her comments at Tuesday’s Chicago Ideas Week lunchtime session at the Museum of Contemporary Art. "Scientific Breakthroughs: Infinite Possibilities" was one of those gee-whiz presentations, at which scientists discussed humans' ability to visit Mars, live alongside robots and explore the galaxy during breaks at our desks.

Planetary scientist Nick Cowan can aim a telescope at a planet circling far-off stars, measure the difference in light and heat when it dips behind its host, and use the results to roughly map its surface and study alien climate.

The tiny surgical robots of Catherine Mohr, director of medical research at surgical robotics company Intuitive Surgical, don't just perform surgeries — they make new things possible by changing the scale. Anything that can be done big might be possible if built smaller, and new technologies make smaller happen all the time. Her new ideas, she added, don’t come from her industry. They come from industries adjacent to hers.

Adler Planetarium astronomer Chris Lintott says new telescopes will yield so many images of far-off galaxies that a crowd-sourced army of volunteers will have to catalog them. Want to see and classify a galaxy no human has ever seen before? Just click. Care to help spot an extraterrestrial planet? Click again.

Scientist and artist Angelo Vermeulen studied how astronauts would survive on Mars during four months with five other scientists in a geodesic dome inside a Hawaiian volcano. He also "terraformed" an Indonesian volcano by planting a garden seeded in part by microbes. Science and art depend on one another, he concluded.

The lessons are universal from astrophysics and surgery, biology, art and planet-hunting: Look to adjacencies. Don’t study one subset when Big Data is available. If you don’t want your employees to be operators, you need to provide them the opportunity for autonomy, diversity, and art.

Most of all, blunders yield breakthroughs.

If everything was done “right,” you’d get only expected results.

"When science is presented, it is often presented as a pure success story," astrophysicist Mario Livio said. "It’s a direct path from A to B. Nothing can be further from the truth."

He described some of the oversights built into Darwin’s understanding of his own theory of evolution. Others filled them in.

"Science is really this zigzag path with lots of false starts, blind alleys and sometimes having to go back to the beginning," Livio said.

There's a mathematical term for screwing up.

"Sometimes you have to do what mathematicians call 'finite amplitude perturbation' to get out of there," he said. "All startup companies are based on this."